Looking back, the truest sign that then-Vivendi Universal honcho Jean-Marie Messier was toast may have come when he showed up for a public forum at the Beverly Hilton two years ago with Viacom Chief Executive Sumner Redstone and other entertainment industry power players, and he wasn't wearing a necktie. The accepted sartorial style for Eurobusiness potentates is, after all, buttoned-up, highly starched, primary colors formality with all the accoutrements -- forget the pocket square and you might as well be naked. On that occasion, Messier had on a shrimp-colored open-necked shirt under his charcoal gray suit. But that affront to taste was just one sign that yet another outsider had gone Hollywood. He had gotten slimmer too, and radiated a healthy tan even in photos.
Chew. Spit. Repeat.
Cover story
The Movie Industry Consumes Carpetbagging Investors Like Prime-Cut Steak. What's the Appeal of Being Eaten Alive?
Little did he know that he was headed for that nearly inevitable fate, the one that has befallen scores of interlopers who've dared to become moguls in that alluring but inscrutable culture known as the motion picture industry: Messier was about to be spanked by Hollywood.
"We don't go for strangers," spoke one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's characters in the writer's final, unfinished Hollywood novel. But he didn't get it completely right. The Industry likes interlopers just fine--as long as they empty their wallets and don't overstay their welcome. That scenario has been repeated in Hollywood almost as often as the two-unlikely-cops-become-wisecracking-crime-fightin'-buddies action thriller. An outsider, flush with success in some other industry or bankrolled by a family fortune, bursts onto the scene with dreams of becoming the next Louis B. Mayer, only to slink away a year or three later in ignominious defeat. The most recent, high-profile examples--Messier and Edgar Bronfman Jr., the Seagram heir whose Hollywood ambitions were intertwined with Vivendi's--are only the latest in a series that goes back to the early days of Hollywood, when sharpies such as William Randolph Hearst and Joe Kennedy came West to get their pockets picked.
Since then, scores of other West Coast carpetbaggers have met with varying degrees of failure--old-line industrialists, Wall Street financiers, insurance conglomerates and corporate raiders, New Economy wunderkinds from this country, plus Dutch, Japanese, British, Italian and Israeli hopefuls. The recent news that Comcast, the Philadelphia-based cable-TV giant, may make a hostile bid for Walt Disney Co. raises the possibility that Hollywood may welcome yet another outsider and would-be mogul--Comcast Chief Executive Brian L. Roberts, a publicity-shy, squash-playing scion of a family that amassed its wealth by making belts. But with few exceptions, such as Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch, the movie industry has chewed up and spit out newcomers like hunks of Morton's prime-cut steak.
Why do all these powerful, wealthy alpha males venture out of their comfy enclaves and plunge into an utterly unfamiliar, notoriously Byzantine business that they often approach with distain and condescension? What sort of mass-induced hypnotic state convinces a German investor, for example, that it's a sensible idea to sink millions into a film homage to L. Ron Hubbard's "Battlefield Earth"? Or an otherwise adroit telecommunications mogul into putting his name in the credits of an unnecessary remake of "Around the World in Eighty Days"? Is there some sort of semiotic explanation for why otherwise astute people from another culture--whether it's Amsterdam or Peoria--get hopelessly tangled up in movie industry lingo and end up mumbling about "synergy" after that disastrous first-cut screening?
To truly understand why would-be moguls mostly fail, we must look past the conventional explanations and into the realms of behavioral psychology and anthropology. It also helps to understand a bit about chaos theory.
The film industry is so notoriously hard to crack that there's a rich literary genre on the subject--ranging from "Final Cut" (Steven Bach's account of Transamerica's disastrous stewardship of United Artists in the 1960s and 1970s) to "Out of Focus" (Charles Kipps' account of David Puttnam's brief tenure as head of Coca Cola-owned Columbia in the late 1980s) to innumerable fly-on-the-wall exposes of the tribulations of Bronfman and others. Similarly, the precise strategic mistakes of the Matsushitas, PolyGrams and JVCs have been dissected and number-crunched by savvy business journalists in the Wall Street Journal, Variety and other business publications. Yet the mountain of bleached bones does little to deter the next wave of wannabe moguls, simply because the one enduring truth about all this is that we're dealing with human nature, not logic.
